Neller Honored for OS/400-based SaaS HCM Offering

Published: July 25, 2006

by Alex Woodie

A human capital management solution from Australian OS/400 software developer Neller, called Preceda Hosted, was honored recently with the IBM General Manager's Award for best on demand solution in the Asia Pacific region.

Neller has been developing payroll and human resources applications for customers in Australia and New Zealand since 1976. The company, which uses LANSA's fourth-generation language (4GL) development environment, has more than 350 customers for its flagship application, Preceda, including Woolworths, the largest corporate employer in the region with 160,000 people.

In 2001, the Australian company broke into the application service provider (ASP) market--what today is referred to as the software as a service (SaaS) business--with Preceda eBureau. Today more than 160 corporations use Neller's SaaS offering, which is now called Preceda Hosted. That list includes several big names, including the Australian Rugby Union, Borders, Citylink Melbourne, Hertz, Ikea, Medibank Private, Siemens, Singapore Airlines, and Sony Australia.

"Years ago we recognized that the future of payroll and HR applications is to give both employees and local manager on-demand control, by providing intuitive and fast Web access that can be managed centrally," says Andy Brown, Neller's executive chairman. "We are delighted to have helped our customers empower their employees and local managers and save them significantly on their administration costs at the same time."

IBM is also pleased with Neller's success in SaaS, a business model it has been pushing for some time. "Neller is a trusted partner for IBM's System i ASP and on demand solutions," says Nick Lambert, director of System i for the Asia-Pacific region. "Our collaboration with leading ISVs such as Neller has assured that System i continues to be the market leading server synonymous with innovation, reliability, and cost effective management demanded by our enterprise customers."

Lambert presented the award to Brown during IBM's annual strategic planning conference, held recently in Bangkok, Thailand.